WikiLeaks is the Real Deal and Deserves Our Support

If you follow this blog at all, you know I’m not one for enthusing about new
activist campaigns and certainly not one to go around exhorting folks to
donate to some cause or other. I tend to err on the side of (perhaps
overly-cynical) aloofness: preferring to let campaigns and groups put some
proof in the pudding before I serve it to my friends. And these past several
years, the pudding served up by the organizations and actions opposing the
warfare state has been pretty thin.

But WikiLeaks is the real thing, folks. It is taking bold, dangerous, big,
deliberate steps to strike at the root of the problem. The best evidence of
how they’re succeeding where so many have failed is in the
frothing-at-the-mouth of the warfare states’ biggest offenders. (They ignored
and ridiculed Cindy Sheehan and hoped she’d go away; they’re openly plotting
the murder of Julian Assange.)

And Wikileaks could certainly use our help. As you may be aware, government
authorities, throwing their weight around outside of ordinary legal channels,
have been successfully pressuring companies providing internet service for
WikiLeaks to cut them off. Because of this, for example, the
wikileaks.org domain no longer works (you can
still reach the site at other addresses, like
wikileaks.de,
and at the numerical
IP address
213.251.145.96).

Amazon web services, a “cloud” service and storage provider, shamefully bowed
to U.S. government
pressure to stop hosting WikiLeaks data, and the
U.S. has even
forbidden many of its employees to view or link to the WikiLeaks-released
diplomatic cables — to the extent of blocking the site to public web browsers
at the Library of Congress. WikiLeaks computers are under a sustained
distributed denial-of-service attack from enraged private and government
entities. The Washington Times and others have publicly called for the assassination of WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange,
and he is being sought on criminal charges that have all the fingerprints of a
dirty trick.

While none of these things are going to be able to stop WikiLeaks from
continuing to release the
U.S. diplomatic
cables that sparked all this retaliation (they’re too crafty for that), it
gives you some idea of the strength and fury of the forces arrayed against
them — forces that are determined to degrade the ability of WikiLeaks (or
anyone else encouraged by their success) to pull off any similar feats in the
future.

So I encourage you to put some skin in the game. There are
several ways to donate money.
You can also follow @wikileaks on
Twitter, which can be a good way to stay informed about things you can do to
help, which may include downloading data to your home computer so that
WikiLeaks data is duplicated and widely-distrubuted so that it is
less-vulnerable to attack. If you have the time and interest, you can also
spend some time reading through some of
the released cables,
summarizing them and contrasting them with official government statements from
the period.

But don’t sit this one out. Finally citizens and refuseniks have struck a
major blow against the empire. You’re going to want to look back at this
moment and remember being on the right side.

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